20 Random Facts About Li Goldstein
by Thanfiction
Summary: The world's a stage, and we are all dancers. Part of the Daydverse 20 Random Facts series.


**1. Her family barely escaped the Cultural Revolution**  
They were ethnic Han, which was bad enough, but her grandfather was a Nanwu, a shaman in the ancient Shenist tradition, and that made him one of the worst examples of the Four Olds. Their 4,000 year old temple was burned, her grandfather and the other priests publicly executed, but several secretly devout villagers managed to smuggle out her grandmother and her teenage newlywed parents in an empty irrigation truck. It took them four years to make their way across the rest of China to Hong Kong, and from there another two years to get passage to the UK - only to discover they were almost as unwanted in London - but they persevered, and by the time Li was young, they were part owners of what her mother ran as a Chinese bakery in front...and her father and Nai Nai kept secretly as a traditional Nanwu's practice out of the back.

**2. She started dancing before she could walk**  
When she was a baby, nothing calmed her like music with a beat, and she was moving her body to the rhythm when she could barely sit up on her own. At not even two years old, she was trying to mimic the dancers they encountered at the tube stations and on the street corners, and at two and a half they gave in and put her in classes. By six she was competing, and ballet class had been joined by tap, gymnastics, ballroom and contemporary. Her parents wondered at how she could come out of four hours of lessons only to start swiveling and stepping the moment she passed a wireless, but they knew a genuine gift when they saw it, and they promised both to make sure she had every opportunity possible and to make _damned _sure no one pushed her too hard. They weren't in China any more, and that wasn't just going to mean Li spoke English first.

**3. She had no idea how she wound up Ravenclaw.**  
It was only half a joke that she couldn't count past eight and thought integers were the numbers between "and." She could count on one hand the number of books she'd read outside what she couldn't get away with scanning the notes about just before class, and she was fairly sure that Elizabeth was the queen that had conquered America and one of the Georges had lost it, or maybe a James. When the hat announced her house, she actually exclaimed "You're bloody joking!" out loud, and it never made sense to her until Stewart Ackerley - runner up for second worst marks in the house - pointed out in fifth year that yeah, neither of them could brew crap in Potions, but damned if you'd call someone who could fly his fingers through a Slash solo or her feet through Bob Fosse's finest at their age anything but brilliant. Ironically, once she realized that, her marks shot up, and she discovered she actually had quite a knack for Charms.

**4. She has a ferocious temper**  
Twice, she has literally set her shoes on fire. The first boy to drop her had his dance bag spontaneously explode. The distance between laughter and shrieking rage has never been very far, and she's lost more friendships than she's managed to keep, because the only thing worse than her temper is her pride. It was the thing she worried about more than anything else when she finally became a mother, but her harshest rage has always been reserved for her own perfectionism. And when it doesn't turn to anger, that same fervent, passionate heart and its vibrant emotions drive so beautifully across the stage and light her magic with an intensity that almost makes up for the latter's lack of technical precision.

**5. She and Michael Corner were partners their entire time at Hogwarts...but never dated.  
**She was showing off on the train to three Hufflepuff third-years who said they were dancers too, and she was in full arabesque penche when they jostled onto a trestle. She lost her balance and nearly fell...but the boy from the seat across the aisle leapt up lightning-fast and swept her into a perfect fish lift. For a split second, she was in love. Then she saw the smug grin on his face and almost slapped him. It was, more or less, exactly like that for the next seven years. As dance partners, they were brilliant, their chemistry sizzling, their bodies perfectly proportioned to one another, and he even came with her to several auditions...but beyond that, no matter how much she could acknowledge his beauty, his ego was about eight times larger than she could tolerate in any human being.

**6. She quit classical ballet at 13**  
It was her fault, she knew. She'd been in pain for weeks, and maybe if she'd gotten treatment sooner, they could have healed it cleanly. But she was nothing if not stubborn, and no one ever said that pointe was supposed to be fun. It was Mike who forced her to the Hospital wing, where they found the medial cuneiform of her right foot almost cracked in half. Even after the best magic could do, it would never be the same. Li could continue dancing en pointe for maybe another five years at most before her instep gave out, or she could give up that technique and keep going ten, maybe fifteen, maybe even a full career's worth of other dance styles. At the time, she thought it was the hardest, most awful choice she could ever have to make, and she cried for weeks.

**7. She never ate like a dancer**  
As a witch, her metabolism was higher anyway, and once she was actively training her magic at school, the number of calories she was burning through became ridiculous. She usually sat with the Quidditch players, just because the House Elves tended to already bring that part of the table larger portions, and she could keep up with any of them. At the studio, she was very aware of the hateful looks and racially-charged murmurs, but she just smiled tightly back at them, took a particularly big bite of double-cheese pizza or her mother's pan fried noodles and made a mental note to ask Professor McGonagall how to non-verbally turn those blonde bitches' diet soda into regular.

**8. She performed surgery on Mike's knee in the RoR. **  
It had happened little by little over the years, things she'd picked up after failed lifts and wrenched joints, but somehow she'd become second only to Ginny Weasley and Mike himself with healing spells, and with Ginny gone, there was nothing else to do when Ernie botched a move in sparring and everyone learned that the prissy, erudite Ravenclaw could say things that would shock a drunken whore and what a compound dislocation looked like. She was shaking and sobbing as he talked her through the whole thing, but the most horrifying moment of the year to date was after he'd passed out when Terry put a hand on her shoulder, looked at her with Mike's smile, and said "he'll forgive you if he can't dance again, just as long as he can fight. That's all that matters any more."

**9. She didn't have any nieces and nephews.**  
She'd never really had much of a social life, something she'd accepted as an expense of having absolutely nothing in common with most of the other girls, nor any interest in living in their world past graduation, but when they were all living in the RoR, she felt a new, unwelcome kind of lonely. The undisputed social queen, of course, was Susan - beautiful, pureblood, married to Lieutenant Macmillan, best friends with the Commander's girlfriend, pregnant Susan - and she found herself trying, awkwardly, to find a place amid the nightly circle of her acolytes. It wasn't that she planned to lie, it just seemed more normal to say she had a big family rather than to say she'd spent half her childhood around circles and lines of mothers waiting for classes to get out.

**10. She had never particularly given any thought to Tony until they were in hospital.**  
She knew Terry, of course. You couldn't not know Terry if you knew Mike; they were practically married. Then there was Steve, all cheekbones and sonnets and soulful dark eyes, and she'd literally stamped in frustration the first time she'd seen the rumors were true and caught him tonsils deep in Derek Adams, because he'd been her crush for most of the first four years. Kevin Entwhistle was one of those obnoxious boys who thought he was cool but just made you want to stand slowly on his larynx and hop a little, and she'd been 90% sure that the one with the black curls that never looked up from his book or made eye contact was Antoine or Andre or something in that neighborhood. Then hell came and went, and the boy's name was definitely Anthony, there was only 85% of him left, and she was wondering how she'd ever missed him.

**11. She was 17 the first time she met her older brother. **  
She hadn't even known he existed until she was 15 and found her parents crying hysterically over a letter. She knew she had one brother, An, 10 years younger, but she'd never known about Xao. He'd only been a few weeks old when her parents had left Hong Kong, but they'd had to hide Jai's pregnancy from the man they bribed for the papers, so he'd been given up to a monk Nai Nai had chosen to raise him. As soon as they found him again, they began wading their way through the sea of paperwork, and they had intended for him to make his first visit from the monastery in summer of '98. Things got rushed when they thought Li might die, and he arrived the day after she was amputated. It did not go well...if you could even use such an optimistic term for "descended into a screaming match about family duty that wound up with her getting slapped and Tony losing his bloody mind and bodily assaulting him."

**12. She had to re-learn **_**everything.**__  
_There was so much you never realized you took for granted. It wasn't just her legs she lost, it was her pelvis, bladder, reproductive organs, and part of her intestines. Her center of gravity was completely fucked, life revolved around catheters and hormone replacement and colostomy bags and avoiding pressure sores and everything she ate _mattered _now because digestion was different, and it was all just so fucking exhausting even before she had to figure out how to maneuver the world in a wheelchair...which also meant having to learn to use a wand with her mouth because of how often both hands were needed. The only saving grace was that her flexibility and upper body strength were already so high, but it was small comfort when she was realizing that she'd have to be carried into her favorite restaurants and shops like some hideous parody of an infant because the wizarding world just didn't consider wheelchairs...and nor did much of London. She hated how quickly her mental map was reduced to where _can _I go?

**13. Her first day back home, she attempted suicide. **  
Her parents hadn't touched her room, superstitiously afraid that it would somehow make the worst real. Besides, there was supposed to be someone coming in later that day from St. Mungos who would help them make the proper adaptations for her long-term, and they had said she'd be fine for a day. They hadn't said there'd be fifteen pairs of dance shoes on the closet floor. Posters everywhere. Trophies. The dance portrait with Mike. That her mambo costume would still be hanging on the dress form waiting for more feathers. That it would hurt too much to scream, to cry, to breathe, to do anything but take all the pain medication she had and be terrified that wouldn't be enough and call Tony on the Galleon and beg him to bring his supply, help her, let her go. He came - Apparated, in fact - but he didn't let her go.

**14. Luna introduced her to UNICEF and War Child**  
She'd been having trouble coping with the empty hours after the loss of her intended career path, but Luna insisted on introducing her to a handful of people she'd met while traveling Cambodia. They were Muggles, but they worked with rescued child soldiers, war orphans, and young victims of landmines. She soon became one of their most valuable volunteers and mentors. Li traveled to rehabilitation programs and refugee camps and hospitals around the world, meeting with some kids even younger than the DC had been, holding their hands and listening to their nightmares, letting them touch her scars and see her wedding ring and photos of her handsome, dashing, elite law enforcement (double amputee) husband and promising that yes, they could still be strong, still have futures, still be loved, still _matter. _

**15. She considered converting to Judaism...briefly.  
**She wasn't anything like strictly Shen anyway, and Buddhism was a philosophy more than a religion exactly; from what she'd read, it was possible to be sort of both. And if she couldn't be sort of both, she was even willing to make the offer to straight up convert if it would make things easier, she'd even prepared a few careful phrases in Hebrew to try to break the ice with Tony's family. Then she _met _his grandmother for the first time. They locked eyes, and war was declared long before Bubbe spit, snorted, and sneered that if Tony was willing to give up a nice Jewish girl for _this _sorry little leftover wonton, he'd had his brains crushed along with his toes. She'd smiled like razors and replied that she wasn't a sorry little wonton, thank you...as the bitch who'd be marrying Tony like it or not, she preferred the slur "Heathen Chinese."

**16. Tony danced with her at their wedding. **  
While in some ways, it went better than they'd ever hoped - especially after three years of brain-bleeding frustrating animosity between the two families - it had still been an incredibly stressful few days for Li. The support under her dress was biting in beneath her arms, she couldn't remember who the hell from Tony's family she was sitting next to, her mother's best friend seemed to have forgotten that Li spoke perfectly fucking fine Mandarin thankyouverymuchyoutwofacedcunt...and then Tony was at her chair and asking if he could have a moment of the bride's attention. She was baffled for a moment, but then the music changed to David Tao's 天天, he had picked her up, and she was laughing and crying because oh _when _dear God had he learned to _waltz _and it was all so worth it, a thousand times more would have been worth it to drink in his eyes and his arms and the music and the words as she spun and dipped and wondered how it was possible to fall even more in love.

**17. Her sex life is just fine, thank you.**  
It was amazing how a wheelchair and a wedding ring combined to apparently give complete strangers a vested interest in her genitals. It was shocking at first - never once when she'd had legs had anyone asked her if or how she had sex - but after a while, she began to delight in turning it back on them. If? Oh hell yes, more than you probably. Twice this morning and I think he's got a long lunch, so most likely again in about an hour. How? Well, there's always blowjobs and handjobs and titfucking and rimming and toys and ball sucking and nipple play and this one spot at the base of his collarbones and there are like a dozen different ways with and without magic and potions to make almost anywhere super sensitive, as much as her clit used to be, even, and that's about the hottest game of hide and seek you've ever played and if you use that stuff to paint designs or rinse your mouth with it it's like kissing meets eating out in heaven and she's got this one black and red silk corset with roses that gives her cleavage for days and it'll make him fuck her right at the door if she...well golly, what do you mean, you didn't want to know, that's inappropriate?

**18. There was no question when she met her daughters. **  
There had been hundreds, thousands of children. Even at that camp on that day, there was no reason that one dusty, runny-nosed pair of orphaned toddlers should have stood out from any of the others. Maybe it was the dauntless strength in Asabi's eyes. Maybe it was the way Firyali put her tongue between her teeth when she grinned. But from the first moment Li saw them, something in her heart clutched so intensely that she gasped aloud. _Those are my daughters. _The color of their skin couldn't have mattered less, and it was one of her deepest regrets that she could never make her own mother understand. She didn't feel sorry for them. She wasn't making up for anything. They were hers and she loved them and Tony felt it too and when they had climbed up in her chair and fallen asleep in her arms during her talk, she had felt _whole. _

**19. Her first week as a mother was a disaster.  
**They knew full well that the only reason they'd been able to get the adoption through in under a year with two young, severely disabled parents was because they also happened to be two war heroes with enough Ministry connections to overthrow a small nation and a few very wealthy friends. Nevertheless, greasing the wheels of bureaucracy was absolutely no help in the reality of suddenly going from childless to the parents of a traumatized Gambian two year old and four year old who spoke almost no English and had caught a lovely case of Fire Flu somewhere along the way. And then on top of it all, Anthony got called to Ireland, leaving her home alone, just as she came down with symptoms herself. Her third night as a mother started with everyone throwing up and Asa getting sick in her hair and ended with three broken combs and tears all around before Caroline Johnson was called. Li would be forever grateful for the patience, the kindness, the good-humored crash course in caring for natural black hair, and bless her most of all, the six chocolate truffles and bottle of wine.

**20. She dances.**  
It was something she didn't even dare to think about for years. But for their fifth anniversary, Tony took her to see an exhibition by the reigning World Champions in wheelchair dance sport, and she was shaking and it seemed like someone else was talking when she asked the manager if she could meet them, when she poured out the years and the dreams and the heartbreak to people who for the first time in forever understood when she gushed about their frame and their axial alignment, his beautiful contagion and her whip-sharp spotting. When they'd invited her to the first class, it seemed like someone else's dream. The first time she found herself again zipped into flesh-colored mesh and gaudy sequins, counting off beats with fifty bobby pins in her hair and false eyelashes glued on, it was a dream come true before she even heard her name called for the trophy.


End file.
